NOW, FOOD FOR THE OTHERWISE ENGAGED

By TRISH HALL

Published: April 15, 1987

KATE HENNEBERRY, a sales representative for a shipping company, is walking on West 34th Street with a pear in one hand and a briefcase in the other. It is just past noon, and this is the second course of her lunch. The first course, a few blocks ago, was an apple.

''I always feel guilty taking five minutes off to go to lunch,'' she said. So, unless she is with a client, she usually eats literally on the run.

Across town, Joe Mignano, a law librarian, is walking down Lexington Avenue while listening to a Cyndi Lauper tape and eating chocolate Tofutti. If he stays inside, he usually files papers while he eats. He even stands at a counter to eat breakfast and dinner at his New Jersey home, often watching television or listening to music. ''The sitting down seems so ridiculous because I eat so quickly,'' he said. ''I find when I try to savor things they lose their taste.''

More Americans than ever are trying to ''eat and . . . '' - eat and walk, run, read, work or watch television, or even drive a car. They need what market researchers call ''commuter food,'' ''finger food'' or ''no-think food.'' Mona Doyle, president of the Consumer Network in Philadelphia, which monitors the attitudes of 3,500 shoppers, calls it ''one-handed food.'' Ideally, she said, it requires no utensils and does not drip, crumble or demand inordinate attention on its path from hand to mouth.

Edward Ogiba, the managing director of Product Initiatives, a Darien, Conn., concern that helps food companies develop new products, said: ''Convenience is not enough anymore. It is very important for food to be in smaller portions, to be a one-person or one-occasion-size offering. The leading edge of that is hand-held food.'' Besides, consumers feel guilty about waste, he said, and preportioned food eliminates that.

In response, food companies are offering more ready-to-eat items in single-portion servings. They are taking foods that used to be eaten in bowls, like pudding and yogurt, and putting them on sticks. Fast-food restaurants are developing an even wider range of small, easy-to-eat foods.

Nabisco has repackaged most of its brands so that they are available in small sizes - six Oreos or two long Fig Newtons, for instance. Kentucky Fried Chicken is trying out Chicken Littles, an ounce of chicken on a tiny roll with a dab of mayonnaise, selling for 39 cents. Lipton is testing individual frozen pie slices under its Country Inn label. General Mills has begun selling Yoplait frozen yogurt in a squeezable paper cone. Campbell Soup is test-marketing Campbell Express, packets that include vegetables and a dip, or crackers with fresh fruit. Kraft Inc. is trying out VegiSnax, small bags of carrot and celery sticks.

General Foods, which successfully turned pudding into Jell-O Pudding Pops, recently put already-mixed Kool-Aid into single-serving containers. John Webber, director of marketing research, said one-handed food was just one element of an increasingly common attitude: '' 'I want what I want whenever I want it, wherever I am.' ''

So pervasive is this mindset that Mr. Ogiba of Product Initiatives predicted that snack products will make up half the items sold in supermarkets within 10 years. Economically, that may help the seller more than the buyer. John Lister, whose Manhattan firm, Lister Butler, designs packages for clients like Nabisco, said food companies ''can demand a premium on a small unit.''

And because smaller package sizes are geared to rapid consumption, people may buy the product more often.

Ms. Doyle of Consumer Network said shoppers want food that is even easier to eat than what is available now. ''The snacks that have dominated the category for the last 10 years are not sufficiently one-handed,'' she said. Chips, for instance, usually come in a bag that must be held in one hand while the other hand does the grasping.

Ms. Doyle says consumers want substantial food that can be eaten with one hand. Substance combined with one-handedness may help explain the recent popularity of meat snacks, which are among the 10 fastest-growing items on supermarket shelves. GoodMark Foods Inc. of Raleigh, N.C., said last quarter's sales of its meat snacks, including its popular Slim Jim meat sticks, increased about 20 percent, to about $18.5 million, compared with the same quarter the year before.

Anthony Adams, the director of market research and planning at Campbell Soup, said that people combine activities because this makes them feel more efficient. ''Consumers are perpetually on roller skates today,'' he said. ''There is a sense of achievement in doing this.''

If a meal is just a chore rather than an event, it can be dispatched quickly, leaving time for errands, exercise or just more sleep. Stephen Rosen of Berkeley, Calif., often uses his time in the morning to go running or to iron a shirt. On his way out the door, he may smear some peanut butter on a rice cake to eat in the car. ''The rice cake isn't so good because it falls apart all over the seat,'' he said. The perfect breakfast food, he said, has not been invented, but it would be ''a combination of liquid and solid that you could eat in the car.'' Mr. Rosen, a health-care worker in San Francisco, frequently has lunch at his desk. But that requires a special set of skills. He explained: ''The telephone rings, and I want to keep eating, but I know people think it's rude. So I turn the mouthpiece away and try to ask a question that will give me time for five or six bites.'' Christine Scalzo, a lawyer in Utica, N.Y., likes to sleep ''right to the very last minute,'' she said. So she often grabs an Egg McMuffin and eats it in her car on the way to work. She, too, used to eat lunch at her desk every day because that was the custom at her old law firm in Syracuse, but now that she has moved to Utica, she goes out to lunch. ''Living in a small town, people take their time,'' she said. ''Almost everyone here takes an hour.''

Victoria Stancil also eats out -while window-shopping. On a recent cool spring day, she carried a folded piece of pizza in one hand, with paper artfully arranged so the juice wouldn't drip down her arm. ''There's a knack to this,'' she said.

Michael Fuentes, a shipping clerk at a jewelry company who gets a 45-minute lunch break, often uses the time to run errands. On day recently he dropped off his amplifier at a repair shop and ate fried plantains from a deli as he walked back to work. Favoring sleep over food, he often brings a roll with egg and ham on it to work. ''I chew on that as I go along, filling up a box or making a bill of lading,'' he said.

While New Yorkers eat on the run, other Americans are more likely to eat on the road. According to the NPD Group, a market-research company in Chicago and Port Washington, L.I., 8 percent of all meals sold by restaurants are eaten in cars. Kentucky Fried Chicken says its

Chicken Littles are well suited to dining on the move. In Louisville, Ky., ''the local police are coming through the drive-through, buying a bagful and eating them on patrol,'' said Gregg Reynolds, a company spokesman.

McDonald's, where half the business comes at the drive-through windows, is promoting four new breakfast sandwiches in an advertising campaign with the slogan, ''Taking breakfast by the hand.''

Wendy's is testing a new breakfast menu with items that are faster to prepare and easier to carry. Customers won't find omelets on test menus.

''You certainly can't eat an omelet going down the road,'' said Denny Lynch, a company spokesman. On his 32-mile morning commute, George E. Moon, who designs car interiors for the General Motors Corporation, sees that at least half of the drivers are eating or drinking something like coffee or tea. He said he believes that automobile makers can provide better contraptions to keep food and drinks secure. In the last two years G.M. and other manufacturers have started installing cup holders in some cars. For vans and wagons G.M. is also working on designs for small cooling and heating devices for food. How about microwave ovens in cars? ''I don't see why not,'' Mr. Moon said.